A bit about politics, quite a bit about social policy, a lot about housing

Housing is the big thing missing from today’s major report on living standards from the Resolution Foundation.

The final report of its Commission on Living Standards looks at the plight of low and middle income families. Things were bad even before the crash with average incomes falling by £570 between 2003 and 2008 as growing inequality meant that prosperity was not shared around. The gap was only made up by a £730 a year increase in tax credits.

As the slow motion train crash of welfare reform continues, the driver is ignoring a succession of people desperately waving as he passes them.

Heedless of the big red flags they are holding, Iain Duncan Smith and his conductor Lord Freud sometimes even wave back and blow the whistle of their sleekly designed train in acknowledgement of what they see as the congratulations of the crowd.

It’s almost 50 years since Peter Rachman died and we still use Rachmanism as a shorthand term for everything that is bad about bad landlords. But is what we think we know wrong?

That is the premise of a fascinating documentary on BBC Radio 4 this week that set out to find The Real Rachman – the Lord of the Slums (listen again on iplayer here). The legend it investigated was of the evil vice racketeer who owned slum properties in Notting Hill packed full of tenants with working girls ‘bending the basement’ below them. In 1963 the People exposed an ‘empire based on vice and drugs, violence and blackmail, extortion and slum landlordism the like of which this country has never seen and let us hope never will again’. The same year Panorama exposed a ‘big time 20th century racketeer’ who sent men round with dogs to evict his tenants.

‘We’re not in any way complacent,’ Mark Prisk told the Today programme this morning – having spent his interview being just that.

It’s the first time I’ve caught a media appearance by the successor to Grant Shapps, who was so ever-present in the radio and TV studios that he was dubbed the minister for Daybreak. Prisk is not on twitter either so other than a few brief interviews and a few blogs he is still a bit of a mystery to me.

There’s a contradiction lurking behind the good news about falling unemployment: we seem to be succeeding in getting people back into work who don’t want to be and failing with people who do.

The headline numbers in the labour market statistics are that unemployment fell by 50,000 in the three months to August to 2.5 million and the number of people in employment rose by 212,000 to 29.6 million. The latter figure is up by 462,000 since the 2010 election and is the highest total since records began in 1971.

Part of the reason why the number of people in work rose faster than unemployment fell is that the proportion of people between 16 and 64 defined as economically inactive is also falling. The total is down by 243,000 since the election to just over nine million and more than half of that fall (138,000) happened in the last three months.

Remember when David Cameron claimed that housing benefit cuts were bringing down rent levels? I bet he doesn’t now either.

Cameron said at prime minister’s questions in January that: ‘What we have seen so far, as housing benefit has been reformed and reduced, is that rent levels have come down, so we have stopped ripping off the taxpayer.’

Read the rest of the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing.